So....

I accepted a boyfriend’s sexual abuse to be rescued from a brother’s verbal abuse, and three years later my daily living is still put on hold by the residual pains of both.

It’s officially an hour and a half into Thursday. The things that consume my mind these days are a strange mixture of the trivial and the critical, and they alternate in my conscience one after the other. Yesterday was Pirate Cupcake Day, and I made twelve cupcakes with Amanda at the dining hall and smuggled them out in a shoebox. Tomorrow will be the weekend, and I will be six hours away in Livingston, New Jersey to file a police report for rape. 

See what I mean about the essential next to the superficial? Although one could argue that both are crucial: without the joy that my friends and [x] roommates bring to me, especially on Pirate Cupcake Day(!!!), perhaps I would find this time in my life to be far more difficult than it currently is.

I still don’t think that he knows that what he did was wrong. Or rather, how wrong it was. When I asked him last year about his perspective regarding that night, he said his thought process was, “I really wanna get laid.” To be honest, I think all I ever was to him was a vagina. The only difference is that the last time he used me, I didn’t participate. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

It fascinates me how it’s the rapist who commits one of the most heinous and looked-down upon crimes in our society, yet it’s often the victim who then grapples with feelings of incomprehensible violation, anger, sadness, and depression, often leading to self-harm and sometimes even suicide. My first self-hurting thought after I realized what had happened to me was, “Now, if I really wanted to off myself, I could.” It was like the last straw. Previously, if I ever had suicidal thoughts, they were just fantasies that I never felt that I had the twisted strength to act out. After the rape realization, I felt like I could actually do it. A total lack of hope for the future and for good prevailing over the bad things that can, may, and will happen in life. It turns out that what I was feeling, the hopelessness, is the hallmark of clinical depression. Once my psychologist told me that, I was able to step back and see my feelings as an illness again rather than a state of being and I snapped out of it. But I feel so deeply for the men and women who don’t.

First post done.